Computer painting
©2013 Charlene Brown
Before I talk about research on Enhancing
Creativity, I’d like to mention a creativity research methodology,
Historiometry, that I hadn’t heard of prior to taking the Scientific
American/NYU course last week. As I’m talking about historical data here, I’m
using an illustration from the ‘History of breakthroughs in the arts andsciences’ from The Fine Art of Physics, to illustrate the post.
Historiometry is a quantitative method of
statistical analysis using retrospective data and historical information.
It has been used by D.K. Simonton to examine different hypotheses about the
creative process.
Psychometric data about creative individuals
(skils and knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, educational
achievement, as well as creative precociousness and productivity) is derived
from biographical references. This is quantified and analyzed in terms of
available information about the individuals’ environments – role model
availability, geographical marginality, economic or military/political
circumstances during their particular period in history – to determine the
impact of these creative individuals on technology, science and the arts.
I am interested in finding out how some of
the more esoteric qualitative variables are quantified, having had to find ways
to quantify the ‘value’ of qualitative variables encountered in fundamental (as
opposed to productivity- related) research at Agriculture Canada when I was a
program evaluator there many years ago.
